World Spirit

Anniversary Celebrations Are Not Enough. An Updated Charter Is Needed To Cope In Post-war Times.

May 15, 1995|JOHN B. ANDERSON Special Correspondent

The 50th anniversary of V-E Day brought back memories of successful wartime collaboration that led to military victory. We will shortly celebrate another event that can also be attributed to Allied unity. The charter of the United Nations was signed in June of 1945, in San Francisco. It was an expression of a common purpose not to see the fruits of victory consumed in another conflict.

At the recently concluded ceremonies in Berlin, the British prime minister, John Major, observed: "I believe for our countries here, it was the last time we will ever fight against each other. I cannot believe that we will ever revert to the old way of doing things."

However, pledges of continuing international amity are not self-executing. If that were so, the Kellogg-Briand Pact, which outlawed war as an instrument of national policy and was signed by more than a score of the principal nations of the world in 1929, would have prevented the war that came only a decade later.

Nor is the present U.N. charter without serious imperfections. Recently I visited with the only living American signer of the U.N. charter, Gov. Harold Stassen, who is approaching his 90th birthday. As we talked, he held in his hand a sheaf of amendments to the charter on which he has been working in anticipation of the U.N.'s 50th birthday. There was a gleam in his eye as in that still marvelously rich and resonant baritone voice he offered not simply a paean to the past, but he held forth a vision for the future. It is a vision for a restructured and truly empowered United Nations.

There is bitter irony in the fact that a month from now the celebrations of U.N. Charter Day will be blended with harsh criticism from sponsors of legislation like H.R. 7, which passed the U.S. House of Representatives in February. This legislation would virtually eviscerate the peacekeeping functions of the U.N. by its sharp reduction of U.S. financial support.

It is only two years since the Volcker-Ogata Report (the former being the ex-Federal Reserve chairman) recommened the build-up of at least a $400 million reserve earmarked exclusively for peacekeeping. There are those, of course, who would rejoice at such an outcome. Sen. Jesse Helms, R-N.C., has referred to the U.N. as the "nemesis of millions of Americans."The Republican Budget Resolution in the Senate proposes to freeze defense spending at about one-quarter of a trillion dollars. The $1 billion we were assessed for peacekeeping last year amounts to only $4 for every American.

In a recent discussion of this issue in a public forum provided by a new TV talk show in New York City, I encountered a spokesperson for the Montana Militia. In response to my argument for the empowerment of the U.N. through an updating of the charter, the man from the Big Sky Country responded with the Big Lie: The U.N. was the brainchild of Alger Hiss, a communist. And those of us who espoused such ideas could only be socialists, communists, or worse.

Our president has been to Moscow trying to sell Boris Yeltsin on the expansion of NATO toward the East. However, the fear of Russian troops pouring through the Fulda Gap into Germany has ended. The world needs a new approach to maintaining world peace.

Daniel Pleach of the British-American Security Information Council recently wrote: "History is full of periods were empires collapse and there are brief periods of stability before new competitions arise. I don't believe most people realize what a historic moment this is."

Instead of merely celebrating the past and desperately trying to find some justification for a new NATO mission, the president and his advisors need to grasp the real challenge of this historic moment before some new fault line, some new division in the world community, establishes the battleground of the future. The occasion calls for the hard preparatory work that would go into a meeting of world leaders determined this time to aim for pax universalis (George Bush's term in his address to the U.N. in 1991), not a new American-Russian imperium or some other alliance system.

This brings us full circle to the subject of U.N. peacekeeping. It worked in Namibia, El Salvador, Cambodia. It didn't work in Somali or Bosnia-Herzegovina, where peace enforcement units trained for that purpose rather than traditional peacekeeping forces were required.

We need a world summit convened in the same spirit that pervaded that San Francisco meeting some 50 years ago. It should review the charter so that it can work in the new post-Cold War environment. The celebration of another anniversary is not enough.

The author, a former Republican congressman from Illinois, ran for president as an independent in 1980. He wrote this article for the Sun-Sentinel.